Primary tasks or roles to play
Letās see what an investment banking professional or a hedge fund manager does daily.
Letās talk about investment banking first. Your chief daily tasks would be ā Investment banking pitch books, modeling, and administrative work. Your main work revolves around pitch-book creating and modeling. Administrative work is less and often you can do it in your spare time. Now, what is pitch-book creation? A pitchbook means a buy-side client presentation. As investment banking professionals, you need to understand the market overview, and you also need to take care of graphical representation of possible exchange ratios. Besides creating a pitch book, it would help if you also handled multiple deals simultaneously. You will prepare models for mergers (or any other models) for multiple deals simultaneously and try to make them enticing for clients. Based on your representation, they would make the decisions. It would help if you also handled all the scenarios and would require you to perform sensitivity analyses. In short, you need to handle multiple clients simultaneously and expect the day to be hectic.
As a hedge fund manager, you need to handle the following things regularly ā
- New investments/ new memos: The primary focus of a hedge fund is to evaluate and research investment. We have already mentioned that as a hedge fund manager, you need to ensure that your ultimate goal is improving investment performance. After evaluating the investments, you will send your PM an email outlining the same (key pointers). Or, sometimes, if the investment needs to give more emphasis, you can create a whole memo detailing your findings and send them across.
- Source & structure deals: Your main emphasis in a day would be to decide on the structure of the terms on less liquid assets or private/ semi-private deals. It would help if you also present potential deal scenarios to clients.
- Investment updates: You would work on many holdings as a hedge fund manager. Thus, if any major change has occurred which can impact the investment in a major way, you need to provide updates. It may also require you to update the full thesis.
- Marketing materials: You need to create marketing materials depending on the size of your fund so that you can pitch to your potential clients. You need to include benchmark, alpha/beta, sharp ratio, etc. and the whole strategy in the marketing materials to benefit your clients.